30 seconds is advertisement which is served by a rather isolated ad system
That is technically possible. But to be honest unless the employee had some unnatural special attachment to that particular clip, they could hurt their previous employer much more by just deleting all the files. Its alot of work to find or collect a video clip, then reformat it for the ad system, then reprogram the ad system so no one notices. Heck of a lot easier to just wipe the thing so it all has to be re-entered or restored from backup and re-enter any changes.
Or if the saboteur really wanted chaos, swap all the files around so the cableco is sued for fraud for not providing the correct service. No one would notice for weeks, maybe, until the lawyers descended... After all, local ads are showing up (just the wrong ones at the wrong time)
Is it possible that someone could have physically hacked into some neighborhood/regional distribution box and injected other programming onto a channel?
My house is on a 20 dB tap so the hardline is at a 20 dB higher level than the drop to my house.
Whatever I inject will be 40 dB lower on my neighbors drop since its 20 dB from my drop the the hardline, then another 20 dB to their house.
Now, if I lived at the end of the line, perhaps right before the input of an amp or at a terminator, maybe I'd be on a 4 dB tap so I'd only use 4dB.
You could tap into the hardline that has several amps at 90 V AC to run the inline amplifiers... You ever seen that video of the hotdog that's cooked by getting put across 110 V AC? You get the idea. Seriously, the fuse would blow before anyone got cooked. None the less I'd advise against fooling around with cable company hardline, especially since it's right next to the high voltage power lines...
Or you just use sci-fi technology to splice into the fiber. Yeah right. Maybe on a TV cop show. You'd have better luck practicing your ninja skills to break into the headend.
In summary, no, unlikely.
Anyone who could do that would probably find something more fun/profitable to do, like give everyone all the channels for free or something.
I thought it was an analog, non-QAM stream that was affected.I thought QAM was only for digital transmissions. I'm curious to know, having only a "pro-sumer" knowledge of how cable broadcast works.
I didn't know that was released that it was definitely an analog. QAM is digital yes. Analog in the US would be NTSC although I heard there was at least one cableco pushing ATSC (the over the air digital) format.
Note that if it only affected folks watching the NBC channel on settops, then they are running digital simulcast where you tune to a local channel and you think you'd see the direct connect analog NTSC channel but the box replaces it with the digital simulcast.
Just because there is an analog channel for the direct connect customers doesn't mean the settop users aren't seeing a digital simulcast.
I work for a CATV operator, and my desk is 200 feet from the headend. There is no way that could have been a glitch.
You guys still all analog? I'm not trying to be harsh or whatever, just finding it hard to believe. Went digital here, oh, about a decade ago. It's kind of like finding the last MF switching trunk in the (former) bell system, or the last SxS switch, or finding the last operational production VAX system, or finding the last thicknet 10base5 lan. Just idle curiosity.
Reasonable providers (read those that aren't Comcast) will separate adult and non-adult programming onto different QAMs.
Not possible when marketing insists on using the same on-demand / pay-per-view system to sell "fuzzy bunnies animated childrens movie" and "xxx naughty cheerleaders" or whatever. Also switched digital video is hard to segregate, although at least in theory you could do it. You are partially correct that you can segregate continuously broadcast non-switched digital video channels. Even funnier would be a QAM boots up on the wrong frequency and at a high enough level to capture the "real" channel. And then there are wiring errors.
Reasonable providers (read those that aren't Comcast) will separate adult and non-adult programming onto different QAMs. This minimizes exposure to issues with adult-content.
Where I work they don't reboot QAM modulators during certain hours anymore after a very similar unfortunate incident that also made all the major media outlets. If the parents are watching TV at 3am, then yes there is a 1 in a billion chance they'll see something interesting for a few seconds.
I have no idea what they were thinking rebooting a QAM during the game. If that thing hadn't come back online, rather than just being kind of scrambled up, it would have been black screens all around for at least maybe ten minutes before a working one could be patched in. Of course sometimes accidents happen and sometimes things spontaneously crash/reboot in which case there really isn't anyone to blame.
Your figures are far field after antenna gain "effective" power levels. Since the output of that dish is practically as pointy as a laser, the "effective isotropic" levels are immense with just a few KW of power.
In the near field, your exposure would be roughly equal to the total transmitter power (probably a couple KW) * your illuminated surface area (probably a couple square feet) / the antenna illuminated surface area (couple acres? maybe a quarter million square feet). That multiplies out to about 50 milliwatts or so. Roughly a tenth of a full power hand held cell phone.
I would advise not standing on the dish because you're likely to bend the panels to a significant level at the highest frequencies. So, if you're working in the 20 cm wavelength band, bend it a tenth of a wavelength (2 cm) and that panel is screwed up...
Also I have heard the panels are in some spots quite high above ground, so falling off (or thru) would be... painful to fatal. But I have no real info on panel height above ground just vague claims that some are pretty high above the ground.
If the plant is only available to produce power for %50 percent of it's expected 40 year lifespan
In France, which is admittedly far more technologically advanced than any other nation w/ regard to nuclear power, 80% is considered a failure and 85% would be a record. Probably what France would consider a failure would be pretty good in the less developed countries.
The greenhouse gas emission of the concrete in a plant seems fairly pointless... A thousand windmills might replace one nuke plant (or maybe you'd need 4000), and a thousand windmills is a lot of concrete foundations. Probably building mounted solar uses the least concrete per KW, followed by coal, nuke, followed by ground mounted solar, followed by hydro, followed by windmills at the highest use.
I have no idea why no one makes solar powered concrete kilns. A long solar concentrator around a pipe with a big hydraulic ram at one end like a car compactor. Every morning push a days worth of limestone in one end, and cooked limestone out the other end. Make the pipe a couple weeks long. "Free" cement?
I would guess this beast will never be 100% operational at any moment of its existence.
I'm guessing the "cool" part of this won't be the bottomless pile of hardware in one room, but how they maintain this beast. Just working around one of the million CPU fans burning out is no big deal, but how do you deal with a higher level problem like one of the hundreds of network switches failing, etc?
Ahh, Excel... the first choice in corporate database management systems.
How many other slashdotters work at fortune XXX firms where on paper some executive bean counter says "we use oracle" but on the ground all databases are done in Excel (along with a smattering of everything else?)
It is a step up from three jobs ago, where at another fortune XXX the database management system of choice was what boiled down to an administrative assistant and Lotus's word processing solution. Yes we used plain english to request that Patti make changes instead of sql update statements. Also our sql select statements always began with "hey Patti, could you look up...". Any yes, all "ORDER BY" stanzas were in fact powered by swear words and performed by cut and paste.
This is actually a fundamental flaw of capitalism. One might hastily assume that since energy cost money, market forces would promote energy conservation. Such conservation happens only to a limited extent
No, capitalism is perfectly OK in your example. The market has declared water is not a commodity, although you might disagree your individual opinion doesn't matter much vs the entire rest of the market. Fiji-an water is much better than the polluted Lake Michigan water in Milwaukee. Numerous (hundreds of) people have died in recent years in Milwaukee from contaminated city water, admittedly its not as bad as india or other 3rd world areas but I certainly will not drink Milwaukee city water (only filtered or bottled for me when I'm there, note that I live in a somewhat more civilized area to the west of Milwaukee where it's all ultra-deep wells, so it is safe to drink the city water at home). They are not interchangeable products so it is pointless to compare their costs.
Water could be obtained locally with less energy wasted on transportation
How do you propose to get fiji-an water to Milwaukee with less transportation costs, a really deep directionally bored well?
Also its not "wasted energy", if transportation was the entire point of the product, as opposed to a byproduct to be minimized. Kind of like French wine would be a lot cheaper in the USA if only you could sell Californian wine as French wine. Of course knowing the overall corruption level of the average American business, that probably does happen.
in the US, a synchronous 1.544 Mbps link costs ~$350/month. IOW, too f'ing expensive!
Good luck getting an unframed T1 worth of payload. You'll get 1.536 minus any encapsulation load over a T1. Depends if they're providing over frame relay, or PPP, or SLIP or HDLC or who knows.
T1 is not shared on the local loop. Doesn't matter if its old 4 wire B8ZS or newer HDSL 2 wire, you've got a dedicated pipe between your modems. Not so for most consumer grade shared services.
$350 is dirt cheap for T-1 level of service. If it drops, a hi-cap NOC tech will notice and call you, and a hi-cap tech will be onsite within 4 hours depending on your local telco carrier. Doesn't matter if its xmas eve or 4th of july evening or if its snowing. If your consumer grade connection, maybe someone will arrive sometime during business hours if you call them to set up an appointment days in advance, maybe.
It is possible to pay for a T1 and not get T1 quality of service. That is an individual circuit problem between you and your provider, not a problem with the technology.
Actually, Bananatree3 is right: we are the only species that destroy our own world and lead other species to extinction.
That's quite misanthropic, but at the same time gives humans alot more ability that we deserve... Look into what yeast does to a fermentable alcoholic beverage and its effect on its little world. Think about naturally brewed vinegar and its implications on its little world and fellow bacteria buddies in its little world.
Meanwhile, despite our heroic efforts, the earth still hasn't been "destroyed", barely even a flesh wound.
The difference, and why the LHC was built, is location. Looking at cosmic ray collisions tells us what the end result is going to be, but it doesn't tell us what happens partway through. If you look at a car crash on the side of the road, you know that the car got squished and the driver was injured. If you look at a car crash in a lab with cameras and crash dummies, you can tell that the driver hits the windshield before the crumplezones absorb all the energy.
Yikes not the best slashdot car analogy I've ever seen.
How about, you want to study very high speed cars. On a daily basis people are caught by cops going over 100 mph all over the usa. But the odds of putting a camera up on any old street corner and seeing a 100 mph car are very low and at best you might see one in a zillion years. Like cosmic rays.
Or you could build a race track and have dozens of cars go just as fast whenever you want in front of all the cameras. Like the LHC.
Where my bad slashdot car analogy breaks down is the very rare cosmic ray / cars, when you can actually find one, are going way way way faster than anything we could build in an accelerator / racetrack.
So, you want single events at super high energy, go cosmic rays. You want zillions of collisions at quite pedestrian energies, go accelerator.
Less chance of rioting in the streets in February as opposed to June. Thus the Republican support for changing it to June, to get some blood on the new team's hands.
Which of course is the big lie behind this whole HD conversion scam. As soon as analog is safely dead expect every network affiliate to multiplex six SD signals instead of one HD. ABC stations will carry the whole house of mouse experience. ABC, ABC Family, Disney Channel, ESPN, etc. NBC will do the whole NBC/Universal package with MSNBC, USA, etc. Because they will be able to sell a lot of local commercials. They already have dedicated outside advertising sales reps, solid production facilities, it just makes too much sense to leverage that to sell onto six channels instead of only one.
As an industry insider, I believe you're making the mistake of thinking that increasing the supply of timeslots by a factor of six will either increase viewership by a factor of six to maintain ratings or increase worldwide advertising budgets by a factor of six to maintain the high cost of all ad slots. It sure would increase production and distribution costs by at least a factor of six, thus dramatically lowering profits.
Not to say you won't see "some" extra SD channels, but your suggestion seems like an expensive way to make less money.
TV news is also invaluable if you live some place with frequent storms (e.g. anywhere in tornado alley).
You should be happy they are shutting down the analogs in mid February. There are so few February tornadoes that the NOAA lists all of them on one page.
I have not checked, but I imagine the complete records of all June 'nados would probably be hundreds of pages not just one short page.
Also you have to be realistic. People have been getting warnings about the analog shutdown for YEARS. They do not get YEARS of warnings for a tornado strike. Thus it is only pure good luck that they are still alive. Giving them a couple more months or years of warnings will not help them get a DTV box. If they eventually get a converter anyway, when they try to take YEARS to respond to their new DIGITAL 'nado warning, they'll die just as well as when they would take YEARS to respond in the past. So, from a triage point of view, don't spend efforts worrying about them, since they cannot be saved.
For emergencies the internet simply falls flat due to almost certainly not working.
You must be too young to have been around for 9/11. I'm old enough to have been online at the time, and working at a business class ISP. I honestly don't recall any net related problems. Traffic was not notably higher than a typical workday, per MRTG. I don't remember reading anything noteworthy on the NANOG mailing list at that time. Of course onesie-twosie operators whom had POPs in the WTC had a very bad day, but one or two companies is not "the internet".
If your definition of "the net" is just one news site, perhaps your local paper or something, and it happened to be down, then that's too bad for you, but the rest of the world was OK.
I recall CNN went to just one static story on their page but it was quite responsive the whole day. Slashdot had multiple intentional "dupes" opened roughly every one thousand comments to reduce loading times. I recall logging into IRC and on to a channel that someone had gatewayed a telecaptioning decoder off a news station, so you could "watch" live news TV captions. I believe that is how I "watched" the pentagon plane news.
When, exactly, was the last time "the net" was down, anyway? The Morris worm? I personally had the very bad luck to be the duty engineer on call the night the MS SQL blaster worm was released. That was, in fact, a very bad day, but overall "the net" hardly stopped working.
Dash format 123-45-6789 will return the math result.
Searching on a nine digit integer will generally provide a few pages where it's used as an internal ID number. For example this slashdot comment had a URL with a SID value of 1106263, now if that were a couple powers of ten larger... someday slashdot UIDs will be nine digits long, etc.
It is alot of fun to search on your phone number, see what else it's used for in other area codes.
Searching on dead peoples SS# will probably pull up a social security death index page, although I don't have a number to try.
Even though it is difficult to obtain the fissile material needed, the engineering is not particularly easy. Keeping the engineering details classified makes the job of someone trying to recreate the bomb harder. This keeps the risks of proliferation down.
Dude, you've got to be kidding. It's a cannon with a projectile and target made of nearly pure U-235. Making a target is pretty easy, I'm sure there is some old joke about civil engineers that can be inserted here. Civil engineers have been building targets for centuries, or something like that. Making a cannon has not been the pinnacle of technological development since the middle ages. Rather than make your own cannon, just cut down an artillery piece like the Manhattan project did. Then you've got the mind-bending engineering challenge of casting a projectile and turning it on a lathe, which stopped being challenging in the mid 1800s. Admittedly U is harder to cast than perhaps Al or Zn, but not much harder than Mg or Be or W.
Now I admit there is complicated engineering involved in modern top of the line weapons. Since the bean counters know the special materials are quite expensive and hard to make, if you intend to make tens of thousands of them, there is extreme pressure to use extreme engineering to make it lighter cheaper more powerful, etc. An implosion device is extremely hard to design and needs alot of testing (and even the best designs occasionally failed during tests), but the bean counters approve that expensive design since special nuclear materials are so expensive in thousand device production runs. Also given the cost and bother of launching every gram on a missile, any extreme engineering is worth it to reduce weight, because one less pound of weapon might be one hundred less pounds of missile. Also, given the pain and suffering of working with special materials, extreme engineering to reduce maintenance is worth it if your device will sit around unused for decades, or at least you hope so. And if the extreme engineering occasionally fails, like maybe 25%, that is OK if you have thousands of warheads with multiple ones assigned to each target.
But it you just want to make a big bang to make the political statement that you've joined the club, then its pretty easy, once you get the special stuff, and extreme engineering is not a good idea for the first bang. For example, the first terrorist detonation will almost certainly be from an uninspected 60000 lb ocean shipping container, so there is no point in extreme engineering to make it light enough to fit on a missile. Then again since the borders are basically wide open (re illegals, etc) the first might be on a semi truck, but still no engineering pressure for light weight. Why make a suitcase nuke when you don't need to, because you can just as easily haul in cubic yards and tons?
Once a country or other group joins the nuclear club, I'm sure their bean counters will want the fancy designs that the US and USSR spent zillions optimizing. But then its waaaaaaay too late to prevent proliferation, by the definition of proliferation. Since the borders of the US are wide open for giant heavy weapons there is no point in making tiny light ones anyway. If in the 1950s the usa could have simply sent shipping containers of weapons to the USSR or driven semis across from alaska, we'd never have wasted the engineering time and money on the tiny light devices.
Here's the mandatory slashdot car analogy. You're saying that if the 2009 indy-500 car racing team A wants to prevent team B from winning, they should classify the design of the original ford model T car. Or maybe, if in 2009 we want to stop china from competing with ford, we should classify the model T blueprints.
No terrorist orginaization would want to create such wasteful bombs, so the information he is publishing is not very dangerous at all.
You seriously think that a terrorist organization would NOT take any sort of nuclear weapon?
You don't understand terrorism. All you need to create terror and cause chaos and evacuations is a bomb that is just dirty enough to make a geiger counter click somewhat above background rate in front of a TV camera. Heck a granite countertop would probably do (they are quite radioactive). Although potassium based salt substitute (also quite radioactive) is scarier looking. One "real bomb" might destroy a city. But ten thousand hand grenades detonated in the ten thousand largest cities all going clicky clicky on camera is way more effective at generating terror.
The proof that there is no real terrorist threat, and the whole terrorist threat thing is the equivalent of government conspiracy theory daydreams, is that something this simple and easy has never happened despite ex-communist countries being awash in rad-waste free for the pickings, small IEDs are not apparently too hard to find either, add a roll of duct tape, and instant celebrity.
It doesn't matter if you actually destroy the city or not, all you need to do is make the residents act like it's another Katrina (except its even scarier because its "nuclear") and you've won. Prodding the sheep won't be too hard, with the media's help.
That is why a terrorist organization (assuming such a thing even exists) would never be so "wasteful" as to make a traditional a-bomb, when they could make ten thousand dirty hand grenades using the same stuff.
There were many things Russia was doing to raise money - you could vacation there and for a few measly thousands of $$$, ride in their tanks, shoot many of their weapons, and what not. An adventurer's paradise.
But, now, as Russia is flush with cash through oil/gas from pipelines to Europe and the rest of the world, I suppose those small time endeavors just aren't as attractive anymore.
Looks like it's still in operation, high end jet flight costs $32K per hour. Actually more expensive per hour than a space tourism flight, assuming $20e6 for a week in space.
Slashdot Mirror
30 seconds is advertisement which is served by a rather isolated ad system
That is technically possible. But to be honest unless the employee had some unnatural special attachment to that particular clip, they could hurt their previous employer much more by just deleting all the files. Its alot of work to find or collect a video clip, then reformat it for the ad system, then reprogram the ad system so no one notices. Heck of a lot easier to just wipe the thing so it all has to be re-entered or restored from backup and re-enter any changes.
Or if the saboteur really wanted chaos, swap all the files around so the cableco is sued for fraud for not providing the correct service. No one would notice for weeks, maybe, until the lawyers descended... After all, local ads are showing up (just the wrong ones at the wrong time)
Not saying its not possible, just unlikely.
Is it possible that someone could have physically hacked into some neighborhood/regional distribution box and injected other programming onto a channel?
My house is on a 20 dB tap so the hardline is at a 20 dB higher level than the drop to my house.
Whatever I inject will be 40 dB lower on my neighbors drop since its 20 dB from my drop the the hardline, then another 20 dB to their house.
Now, if I lived at the end of the line, perhaps right before the input of an amp or at a terminator, maybe I'd be on a 4 dB tap so I'd only use 4dB.
You could tap into the hardline that has several amps at 90 V AC to run the inline amplifiers... You ever seen that video of the hotdog that's cooked by getting put across 110 V AC? You get the idea. Seriously, the fuse would blow before anyone got cooked. None the less I'd advise against fooling around with cable company hardline, especially since it's right next to the high voltage power lines...
Or you just use sci-fi technology to splice into the fiber. Yeah right. Maybe on a TV cop show. You'd have better luck practicing your ninja skills to break into the headend.
In summary, no, unlikely.
Anyone who could do that would probably find something more fun/profitable to do, like give everyone all the channels for free or something.
I thought it was an analog, non-QAM stream that was affected.I thought QAM was only for digital transmissions. I'm curious to know, having only a "pro-sumer" knowledge of how cable broadcast works.
I didn't know that was released that it was definitely an analog. QAM is digital yes. Analog in the US would be NTSC although I heard there was at least one cableco pushing ATSC (the over the air digital) format.
Note that if it only affected folks watching the NBC channel on settops, then they are running digital simulcast where you tune to a local channel and you think you'd see the direct connect analog NTSC channel but the box replaces it with the digital simulcast.
Just because there is an analog channel for the direct connect customers doesn't mean the settop users aren't seeing a digital simulcast.
I work for a CATV operator, and my desk is 200 feet from the headend. There is no way that could have been a glitch.
You guys still all analog? I'm not trying to be harsh or whatever, just finding it hard to believe. Went digital here, oh, about a decade ago. It's kind of like finding the last MF switching trunk in the (former) bell system, or the last SxS switch, or finding the last operational production VAX system, or finding the last thicknet 10base5 lan. Just idle curiosity.
Reasonable providers (read those that aren't Comcast) will separate adult and non-adult programming onto different QAMs.
Not possible when marketing insists on using the same on-demand / pay-per-view system to sell "fuzzy bunnies animated childrens movie" and "xxx naughty cheerleaders" or whatever. Also switched digital video is hard to segregate, although at least in theory you could do it. You are partially correct that you can segregate continuously broadcast non-switched digital video channels. Even funnier would be a QAM boots up on the wrong frequency and at a high enough level to capture the "real" channel. And then there are wiring errors.
Reasonable providers (read those that aren't Comcast) will separate adult and non-adult programming onto different QAMs. This minimizes exposure to issues with adult-content.
Where I work they don't reboot QAM modulators during certain hours anymore after a very similar unfortunate incident that also made all the major media outlets. If the parents are watching TV at 3am, then yes there is a 1 in a billion chance they'll see something interesting for a few seconds.
I have no idea what they were thinking rebooting a QAM during the game. If that thing hadn't come back online, rather than just being kind of scrambled up, it would have been black screens all around for at least maybe ten minutes before a working one could be patched in. Of course sometimes accidents happen and sometimes things spontaneously crash/reboot in which case there really isn't anyone to blame.
I'm not standing on that dish, no way, no how!
Your figures are far field after antenna gain "effective" power levels. Since the output of that dish is practically as pointy as a laser, the "effective isotropic" levels are immense with just a few KW of power.
In the near field, your exposure would be roughly equal to the total transmitter power (probably a couple KW) * your illuminated surface area (probably a couple square feet) / the antenna illuminated surface area (couple acres? maybe a quarter million square feet). That multiplies out to about 50 milliwatts or so. Roughly a tenth of a full power hand held cell phone.
I would advise not standing on the dish because you're likely to bend the panels to a significant level at the highest frequencies. So, if you're working in the 20 cm wavelength band, bend it a tenth of a wavelength (2 cm) and that panel is screwed up...
Also I have heard the panels are in some spots quite high above ground, so falling off (or thru) would be... painful to fatal. But I have no real info on panel height above ground just vague claims that some are pretty high above the ground.
If the plant is only available to produce power for %50 percent of it's expected 40 year lifespan
In France, which is admittedly far more technologically advanced than any other nation w/ regard to nuclear power, 80% is considered a failure and 85% would be a record. Probably what France would consider a failure would be pretty good in the less developed countries.
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssIndustryMaterialsUtilitiesNews/idUSL205876020080220
The wikipedia estimate of capacity factors for wind power vary from 20 to 40%. Probably 30% would be "typical".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
The greenhouse gas emission of the concrete in a plant seems fairly pointless... A thousand windmills might replace one nuke plant (or maybe you'd need 4000), and a thousand windmills is a lot of concrete foundations. Probably building mounted solar uses the least concrete per KW, followed by coal, nuke, followed by ground mounted solar, followed by hydro, followed by windmills at the highest use.
I have no idea why no one makes solar powered concrete kilns. A long solar concentrator around a pipe with a big hydraulic ram at one end like a car compactor. Every morning push a days worth of limestone in one end, and cooked limestone out the other end. Make the pipe a couple weeks long. "Free" cement?
So the real question in an immense cluster like this, is whats the MTBF?
Simon claims that the Eniac MTBF was 8 hours, although I've seen all kinds of claims on the web from minutes to days.
http://zzsimonb.blogspot.com/2006/06/mtbf-mean-time-between-failure.html
I would guess this beast will never be 100% operational at any moment of its existence.
I'm guessing the "cool" part of this won't be the bottomless pile of hardware in one room, but how they maintain this beast. Just working around one of the million CPU fans burning out is no big deal, but how do you deal with a higher level problem like one of the hundreds of network switches failing, etc?
And this can't be done with say, Excel?
Ahh, Excel... the first choice in corporate database management systems.
How many other slashdotters work at fortune XXX firms where on paper some executive bean counter says "we use oracle" but on the ground all databases are done in Excel (along with a smattering of everything else?)
It is a step up from three jobs ago, where at another fortune XXX the database management system of choice was what boiled down to an administrative assistant and Lotus's word processing solution. Yes we used plain english to request that Patti make changes instead of sql update statements. Also our sql select statements always began with "hey Patti, could you look up...". Any yes, all "ORDER BY" stanzas were in fact powered by swear words and performed by cut and paste.
Sadly I am not making any of this up.
This is actually a fundamental flaw of capitalism. One might hastily assume that since energy cost money, market forces would promote energy conservation. Such conservation happens only to a limited extent
No, capitalism is perfectly OK in your example. The market has declared water is not a commodity, although you might disagree your individual opinion doesn't matter much vs the entire rest of the market. Fiji-an water is much better than the polluted Lake Michigan water in Milwaukee. Numerous (hundreds of) people have died in recent years in Milwaukee from contaminated city water, admittedly its not as bad as india or other 3rd world areas but I certainly will not drink Milwaukee city water (only filtered or bottled for me when I'm there, note that I live in a somewhat more civilized area to the west of Milwaukee where it's all ultra-deep wells, so it is safe to drink the city water at home). They are not interchangeable products so it is pointless to compare their costs.
Water could be obtained locally with less energy wasted on transportation
How do you propose to get fiji-an water to Milwaukee with less transportation costs, a really deep directionally bored well?
Also its not "wasted energy", if transportation was the entire point of the product, as opposed to a byproduct to be minimized. Kind of like French wine would be a lot cheaper in the USA if only you could sell Californian wine as French wine. Of course knowing the overall corruption level of the average American business, that probably does happen.
in the US, a synchronous 1.544 Mbps link costs ~$350/month. IOW, too f'ing expensive!
Good luck getting an unframed T1 worth of payload. You'll get 1.536 minus any encapsulation load over a T1. Depends if they're providing over frame relay, or PPP, or SLIP or HDLC or who knows.
T1 is not shared on the local loop. Doesn't matter if its old 4 wire B8ZS or newer HDSL 2 wire, you've got a dedicated pipe between your modems. Not so for most consumer grade shared services.
$350 is dirt cheap for T-1 level of service. If it drops, a hi-cap NOC tech will notice and call you, and a hi-cap tech will be onsite within 4 hours depending on your local telco carrier. Doesn't matter if its xmas eve or 4th of july evening or if its snowing. If your consumer grade connection, maybe someone will arrive sometime during business hours if you call them to set up an appointment days in advance, maybe.
It is possible to pay for a T1 and not get T1 quality of service. That is an individual circuit problem between you and your provider, not a problem with the technology.
There's a chance that a magnetic monopole might allow static magnetic levitation (Earnshaw's Theorem)
http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/pyrolytic_graphite.html
Everyone knows about diamagnetic levitation, but Earnshaw specifically doesnt apply to diamagnetic materials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnshaw's_theorem
Actually, Bananatree3 is right: we are the only species that destroy our own world and lead other species to extinction.
That's quite misanthropic, but at the same time gives humans alot more ability that we deserve... Look into what yeast does to a fermentable alcoholic beverage and its effect on its little world. Think about naturally brewed vinegar and its implications on its little world and fellow bacteria buddies in its little world.
Meanwhile, despite our heroic efforts, the earth still hasn't been "destroyed", barely even a flesh wound.
Oh the angst!
The difference, and why the LHC was built, is location. Looking at cosmic ray collisions tells us what the end result is going to be, but it doesn't tell us what happens partway through. If you look at a car crash on the side of the road, you know that the car got squished and the driver was injured. If you look at a car crash in a lab with cameras and crash dummies, you can tell that the driver hits the windshield before the crumplezones absorb all the energy.
Yikes not the best slashdot car analogy I've ever seen.
How about, you want to study very high speed cars. On a daily basis people are caught by cops going over 100 mph all over the usa. But the odds of putting a camera up on any old street corner and seeing a 100 mph car are very low and at best you might see one in a zillion years. Like cosmic rays.
Or you could build a race track and have dozens of cars go just as fast whenever you want in front of all the cameras. Like the LHC.
Where my bad slashdot car analogy breaks down is the very rare cosmic ray / cars, when you can actually find one, are going way way way faster than anything we could build in an accelerator / racetrack.
So, you want single events at super high energy, go cosmic rays.
You want zillions of collisions at quite pedestrian energies, go accelerator.
Kind of like high voltage vs high current.
they will scream bloody murder when it does
Less chance of rioting in the streets in February as opposed to June. Thus the Republican support for changing it to June, to get some blood on the new team's hands.
Which of course is the big lie behind this whole HD conversion scam. As soon as analog is safely dead expect every network affiliate to multiplex six SD signals instead of one HD. ABC stations will carry the whole house of mouse experience. ABC, ABC Family, Disney Channel, ESPN, etc. NBC will do the whole NBC/Universal package with MSNBC, USA, etc. Because they will be able to sell a lot of local commercials. They already have dedicated outside advertising sales reps, solid production facilities, it just makes too much sense to leverage that to sell onto six channels instead of only one.
As an industry insider, I believe you're making the mistake of thinking that increasing the supply of timeslots by a factor of six will either increase viewership by a factor of six to maintain ratings or increase worldwide advertising budgets by a factor of six to maintain the high cost of all ad slots. It sure would increase production and distribution costs by at least a factor of six, thus dramatically lowering profits.
Not to say you won't see "some" extra SD channels, but your suggestion seems like an expensive way to make less money.
I believe that what we learned from Rome (or more to the point, the Roman Empire) is how to decline and fall.
... in style
TV news is also invaluable if you live some place with frequent storms (e.g. anywhere in tornado alley).
You should be happy they are shutting down the analogs in mid February. There are so few February tornadoes that the NOAA lists all of them on one page.
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lmk/?n=tornado_climatology_february
I have not checked, but I imagine the complete records of all June 'nados would probably be hundreds of pages not just one short page.
Also you have to be realistic. People have been getting warnings about the analog shutdown for YEARS. They do not get YEARS of warnings for a tornado strike. Thus it is only pure good luck that they are still alive. Giving them a couple more months or years of warnings will not help them get a DTV box. If they eventually get a converter anyway, when they try to take YEARS to respond to their new DIGITAL 'nado warning, they'll die just as well as when they would take YEARS to respond in the past. So, from a triage point of view, don't spend efforts worrying about them, since they cannot be saved.
For emergencies the internet simply falls flat due to almost certainly not working.
You must be too young to have been around for 9/11. I'm old enough to have been online at the time, and working at a business class ISP. I honestly don't recall any net related problems. Traffic was not notably higher than a typical workday, per MRTG. I don't remember reading anything noteworthy on the NANOG mailing list at that time. Of course onesie-twosie operators whom had POPs in the WTC had a very bad day, but one or two companies is not "the internet".
If your definition of "the net" is just one news site, perhaps your local paper or something, and it happened to be down, then that's too bad for you, but the rest of the world was OK.
I recall CNN went to just one static story on their page but it was quite responsive the whole day. Slashdot had multiple intentional "dupes" opened roughly every one thousand comments to reduce loading times. I recall logging into IRC and on to a channel that someone had gatewayed a telecaptioning decoder off a news station, so you could "watch" live news TV captions. I believe that is how I "watched" the pentagon plane news.
When, exactly, was the last time "the net" was down, anyway? The Morris worm? I personally had the very bad luck to be the duty engineer on call the night the MS SQL blaster worm was released. That was, in fact, a very bad day, but overall "the net" hardly stopped working.
Dash format 123-45-6789 will return the math result.
Searching on a nine digit integer will generally provide a few pages where it's used as an internal ID number. For example this slashdot comment had a URL with a SID value of 1106263, now if that were a couple powers of ten larger... someday slashdot UIDs will be nine digits long, etc.
It is alot of fun to search on your phone number, see what else it's used for in other area codes.
Searching on dead peoples SS# will probably pull up a social security death index page, although I don't have a number to try.
We have the identity of the fifth cylon!
Even though it is difficult to obtain the fissile material needed, the engineering is not particularly easy. Keeping the engineering details classified makes the job of someone trying to recreate the bomb harder. This keeps the risks of proliferation down.
Dude, you've got to be kidding. It's a cannon with a projectile and target made of nearly pure U-235. Making a target is pretty easy, I'm sure there is some old joke about civil engineers that can be inserted here. Civil engineers have been building targets for centuries, or something like that. Making a cannon has not been the pinnacle of technological development since the middle ages. Rather than make your own cannon, just cut down an artillery piece like the Manhattan project did. Then you've got the mind-bending engineering challenge of casting a projectile and turning it on a lathe, which stopped being challenging in the mid 1800s. Admittedly U is harder to cast than perhaps Al or Zn, but not much harder than Mg or Be or W.
Now I admit there is complicated engineering involved in modern top of the line weapons. Since the bean counters know the special materials are quite expensive and hard to make, if you intend to make tens of thousands of them, there is extreme pressure to use extreme engineering to make it lighter cheaper more powerful, etc. An implosion device is extremely hard to design and needs alot of testing (and even the best designs occasionally failed during tests), but the bean counters approve that expensive design since special nuclear materials are so expensive in thousand device production runs. Also given the cost and bother of launching every gram on a missile, any extreme engineering is worth it to reduce weight, because one less pound of weapon might be one hundred less pounds of missile. Also, given the pain and suffering of working with special materials, extreme engineering to reduce maintenance is worth it if your device will sit around unused for decades, or at least you hope so. And if the extreme engineering occasionally fails, like maybe 25%, that is OK if you have thousands of warheads with multiple ones assigned to each target.
But it you just want to make a big bang to make the political statement that you've joined the club, then its pretty easy, once you get the special stuff, and extreme engineering is not a good idea for the first bang. For example, the first terrorist detonation will almost certainly be from an uninspected 60000 lb ocean shipping container, so there is no point in extreme engineering to make it light enough to fit on a missile. Then again since the borders are basically wide open (re illegals, etc) the first might be on a semi truck, but still no engineering pressure for light weight. Why make a suitcase nuke when you don't need to, because you can just as easily haul in cubic yards and tons?
Once a country or other group joins the nuclear club, I'm sure their bean counters will want the fancy designs that the US and USSR spent zillions optimizing. But then its waaaaaaay too late to prevent proliferation, by the definition of proliferation. Since the borders of the US are wide open for giant heavy weapons there is no point in making tiny light ones anyway. If in the 1950s the usa could have simply sent shipping containers of weapons to the USSR or driven semis across from alaska, we'd never have wasted the engineering time and money on the tiny light devices.
Here's the mandatory slashdot car analogy. You're saying that if the 2009 indy-500 car racing team A wants to prevent team B from winning, they should classify the design of the original ford model T car. Or maybe, if in 2009 we want to stop china from competing with ford, we should classify the model T blueprints.
No terrorist orginaization would want to create such wasteful bombs, so the information he is publishing is not very dangerous at all.
You seriously think that a terrorist organization would NOT take any sort of nuclear weapon?
You don't understand terrorism. All you need to create terror and cause chaos and evacuations is a bomb that is just dirty enough to make a geiger counter click somewhat above background rate in front of a TV camera. Heck a granite countertop would probably do (they are quite radioactive). Although potassium based salt substitute (also quite radioactive) is scarier looking. One "real bomb" might destroy a city. But ten thousand hand grenades detonated in the ten thousand largest cities all going clicky clicky on camera is way more effective at generating terror.
The proof that there is no real terrorist threat, and the whole terrorist threat thing is the equivalent of government conspiracy theory daydreams, is that something this simple and easy has never happened despite ex-communist countries being awash in rad-waste free for the pickings, small IEDs are not apparently too hard to find either, add a roll of duct tape, and instant celebrity.
It doesn't matter if you actually destroy the city or not, all you need to do is make the residents act like it's another Katrina (except its even scarier because its "nuclear") and you've won. Prodding the sheep won't be too hard, with the media's help.
That is why a terrorist organization (assuming such a thing even exists) would never be so "wasteful" as to make a traditional a-bomb, when they could make ten thousand dirty hand grenades using the same stuff.
The simple facts are that he (a truck driver!) is collecting detailed information about some of the worlds least efficient nuclear bomb designs.
Besides, a lot of the difficulty in making even an inefficient nuclear bomb at all obtaining the weapons grade fissile material.
Maybe a better way to summarize his work vs "the real thing" would be a different analogy:
It's like comparing a guy who enjoys collecting pr0n vs actually reproducing with a supermodel.
There were many things Russia was doing to raise money - you could vacation there and for a few measly thousands of $$$, ride in their tanks, shoot many of their weapons, and what not. An adventurer's paradise.
But, now, as Russia is flush with cash through oil/gas from pipelines to Europe and the rest of the world, I suppose those small time endeavors just aren't as attractive anymore.
http://www.flymig.com/
Looks like it's still in operation, high end jet flight costs $32K per hour. Actually more expensive per hour than a space tourism flight, assuming $20e6 for a week in space.